Osman Rashid, co-founder and CEO of Kno, is seen inside the digital interactive textbook provider's offices in Santa Clara, Calif. on Friday, April 26, 2013.

Osman Rashid, co-founder and CEO of Kno, is seen inside the digital interactive textbook provider's offices in Santa Clara, Calif. on Friday, April 26, 2013.

Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

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Kno leading shift to digital textbooks

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Just as more and more people are reading books on their tablets, so are students turning to digital textbooks to learn.

Kno co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Osman Rashid hopes to be at the front of the line as students and teachers begin making that shift.

The Santa Clara startup is one of several efforts to transform the traditional paper-and-ink textbook. The CK-12 Foundation, for instance, a nonprofit in Palo Alto led by Neeru Khosla, is developing digital textbooks that teachers can customize and use for free. The Twenty Million Minds Foundation in Southern California is using crowdsourcing - tapping the collective minds of researchers, professors and other experts - to produce free digital textbooks for college students. Amazon, Barnes & Noble and the major publishers are also making significant strides in the industry.

Kno is working with traditional textbook publishers to create digital textbooks that students can use on their smartphones, tablets and computers. It's also developing tools to help students learn, such as digital flashcards and an online journal that saves their notes and the text they've highlighted.

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In a recent interview, Rashid discussed the future of the textbook and the classroom. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q:How did Kno come about?

A: It's a bit of a personal story. I have two daughters and (one day) they were doing homework. I had a flashback that I used to do homework the same way, almost four decades ago.

Technology hasn't done much for education. We wanted to start a company with a mission to change the way students learn.

This was the pre-iPad days. We set out to come up with a tablet-based learning solution. As time went by, the iPad was announced (and then) Android tablets were announced. For us, this was a great thing. We didn't want to stay in hardware for too long, so we began to do software. Two months after we launched our software, it became the No. 1 app on the iPad for education and a top 10-grossing app.

Q:How does going digital affect cost?

A: Today in the market you can get a digital version of the same book at almost half the price, so the books are getting cheaper and the prices are continuing to go down.

But the notion (for Kno) is, it's not only digital. It has great interactive features. Everything that you're writing is saved in the cloud so you can access it anytime, anywhere. It's giving you analytics. We have a product that allows students to see their own study patterns and even to communicate with or follow another student in the classroom (with the other student's permission) to see how they study.

We produce flashcards for you. There are videos and 3-D and sound files. It's (also) purposefully designed so that if the teacher is still using the physical book, it looks the same as the one in the classroom. You're always on the right track with your teacher.

Q:The publishing companies are also rolling out digital textbooks and their own learning software and services. How does that affect Kno?

A: Pearson is a big partner for us. So is Cengage, Wiley, McGraw-Hill and all the major publishers. We have partnerships with 100-plus publishers and have more than 200,000 titles in our catalog, one of the largest ones out there for education.

We come at everything from the student's perspective. A student wants all of their content from different publishers in one spot, to use in a consistent fashion. If you take a look at UC Berkeley, all the courses for the freshman class are covered by 29 different publishers. So you could be going to three or four different publisher websites, with all different experiences. We pull it all together for you in one spot, which is a huge benefit for students.

Q:How do you see the industry changing?

A: A textbook today is essentially a body of knowledge that you must master. In the physical form, it's going to decline and it's going to move to digital.

The digital textbook is a big, big body of content, and it will begin being broken down into micro-content, into smaller bits of content. How you consume it will be different than by going from chapter to chapter.

Q:Education is unique since it's about kids and learning. You don't necessarily want to take any huge risks.

A: It's that and you (also) have teachers who are so underwater with all the things they have to do. If you change too much for teachers, it's going to be hard for them to teach. There are all these layers.

There's a whole thing going on with the consumerization of education, with parents and students going into the classroom and showing their teachers textbooks on their tablets and saying, "Why can't I use this one? It's the same as the one on the table."

For education to go digital, three things have to happen: (First), it's mobile technology. Mobile technology and smartphones have to take off, which they are. No. 2, you need publishers to deliver digital content, which can be made interactive, which is also happening. And No. 3, you need a great learning experience and application, which makes it easy to consume, which is what Kno is delivering. Wrap these together, and that's when somebody can use it in the classroom.

Two years ago, schools, parents, teachers and professors would say, "What is a digital textbook? Tell me about it." Today that question is gone. What they're saying is, "Where do I get it? How do I deploy it? How can my entire school use it?" It's gone from "if" to "how," which is a big transition in the industry.